2016 — the making and the talking

This year I sadly left the wonderful team at Trove and took up a full-time academic post at the University of Canberra. But it was Trove that dominated the early part of the year, as the impact of continual funding cuts on the National Library of Australia became clear. Users of Trove shared their feelings on Twitter and Facebook, organisations posted statements of support, and numerous articles appeared in the media. In the lead up to the federal election, both the Greens and ALP made commitments to support Trove and our national cultural institutions.

In the last few days, we’ve learnt that the Government will provide $16.4 million over four years to the NLA ‘for digitisation of material and upgrade of critical infrastructure for its Trove digital information resource and to upgrade other critical infrastructure’. While we wait to hear exactly what this means for the future of Trove, it’s important to remember that it comes after many cuts and job losses across the cultural sector. The lesson of #fundTrove is that we cannot take the future of our collecting organisations for granted. We need to show why they matter and fight for the resources they need.

Access is important — both its politics and its practicalities. This year I’ve tried to be a bit more rigorous in the way I share information and document my projects. I created a Digital Heritage Handbook where I publish workshops, activities, and other bits and pieces. Much of it is in draft form, but I decided it was better just to push everything out in the hope that it might be useful. Similarly, I created an Open Research Notebook to share work in progress. The Handbook also includes details of the two undergraduate units I taught in second semester — Working with collections, and Exploring digital heritage. I think they went pretty well, but I’ve got a few improvements planned for 2017.

This year I accidentally built my own version of Historic Hansard, created an interface to National Archives files we’re not allowed to see, and mined ASIO surveillance files for redactions. As well as these major projects, there were lots of little hacks and harvests aimed at exploring the idea of ‘access’. You can follow my main research obsessions in my notebook:

People of Australia@people_aus is a Twitter bot sharing random names drawn from late 19th and early 20th century naturalisation records held by the National Archives of Australia. Many names. Many cultures. These are the people of Australia.

RecordSearch Series HarvestsCode to harvest the metadata and digitised images of all items in a series from the National Archives of Australia. Data from an assortment of harvested series are available as CSV files.

SRNSW indexesCode for harvesting indexes from the State Records of NSW website. Data from 59 harvested indexes is available as CSV files.

Facial detection demoCode and website to demonstrate the principles of facial detection using OpenCV.

Show Redactions userscriptCode for inserting details of redacted files into RecordSearch results.

ASIO ExperimentsCode used for the extraction of redactions and other experiments with digitised ASIO files.

Open with Exception browserCode and website providing an experimental browser for digitised ASIO files from the National Archives of Australia.

Invisible Australians browser
Updated code and website providing an experimental browser for digitised records from the National Archives of Australia relating to the administration of the White Australia Policy. Now includes a landscape view for exploring records by their orientation.

Closed Access harvester
Updated code for harvesting and analysing records from the National Archives of Australia with the access status of ‘closed’.

Closed Access datasetComplete dataset of records held by the National Archives of Australia that had the access status of ‘closed’ (withheld from public access) on 1 January 2016.

Closed Access websitePublic web interface for the exploration, analysis, and visualisation of ‘closed’ records in the National Archives of Australia.

RecordSearch FunctionsCode and documentation for analysing the performance of functions by Commonwealth government agencies over time, using data from the National Archives of Australia.

Commonwealth Hansard XML repository
A repository of the (almost) complete proceedings of the Commonwealth House of Representatives and Senate from 1901–1980. This comprises several gigabytes of XML-formatted files harvested from the ParlInfo database.

Historic Hansard
A public website that presents the proceedings of the Commonwealth House of Representatives and Senate from 1901–1980 in a form that is optimised for browsing and reading. It includes additional features such as indexes to people and legislation, and the integration of tools for text analysis and annotation. Documentation is also provided.

Trove HarvesterCode and documentation to support the creation of large datasets for research and analysis from Trove’s digitised newspapers.